Analyse af 'Reconciliation': ægteskabskonflikter og karakterisering

Marriage or just love in general is a phenomenon that affects peoples in ways unseen before. It can force feelings you have never experienced before, and it can be the most beautiful thing as well as the thing which makes you fall deeper and deeper in to depression. This ability that love involves often leads to major conflicts with yourself as well as your partner, and at worst ends with divorces and break-ups. “Reconciliation” is a story that emphasizes this matter where we follow Laura, the narrator, in a deep conflict with herself and her husband Vernon, which has led her to applying a job as a temp for her own husband at his office. The main theme of the story is: marriage conflicts. In my analysis and interpretation of “Reconciliation”, I will focus on the following three perspectives, which shows us how the theme is shown: A characterization of the narrator, the narrator’s relationship with her husband and the use of imagery in the story. Laura, the first person narrator, is a nervous and insecure woman with low self-confidence. She is a woman who can’t seem to think clearly regarding the situation she is in with her marriage. She is unstable:“It’s my first day. I cycled here in my trainers and I have forgotten my shoes.” (Page 1 line 1)The first two sentences of the story, and us readers get a good insight in how nervous and insecure a woman she is, with the fact that she has forgotten her shoes. Forgetting your shoes is not something that you don’t notice for a while like she did. She is a person who has given up in life and doesn’t seem to care about the everyday life anymore due to the marriage conflict she has:“Im wearing the clothes I slept in. It saved me 20 minutes this morning and meant I could sleep a little longer” (Page 1 line 15-16).The fact that she has chosen to wear the clothes she has slept in, shows us that she appears as a low-class person who is economically unstable, even though she isn’t. She is just going through a marriage conflict that has affected her in a really hard way and has made her a person who has nearly given up the everyday life. If we look at the narrator’s relationship with her husband, Laura, the narrator, desperately wants her husband back. But Vernon, her husband, has clearly moved on and is not stuck in the past as she is. She shows us how he has moved on and how she can’t recognize him anymore: “He looks so like my husband, and yet... How has he managed to remain himself, to become – dare I say it – even more himself, with not even a scar and even a brand new blue shirt?” (Page 2 line 49-51)She shows us how he has moved on with becoming more himself without any scars which symbolizes any kind of grief over the divorce. The new blue shirt symbolizes the way he is moving on and is “on top of the world” while Laura on the other hand can’t seem to realize the fact that he is so easily over her, by asking this question to herself. She is still in this marriage conflict, while Vernon is clearly over her and moved on. The use of imagery is the story’s peculiarity and unique way of communicating and showing its central points of the story. It is something that has a magnificent significance in the story, as Laura, the first person narrator, uses these imageries in order to emphasize her message to us readers. When Laura starts reconciling by matching the same numbers from one sheet with the numbers on the other sheet, she starts imagining that the numbers are more than just numbers on a sheet: “What about 22.48 and 22.49 – do they belong to each other? After all, they are so nearly the same. But then, 22.48 presents itself, collects its perfect partner and 22.49 remains unreconciled.” (Page 3 line 94-96)She acts like if the numbers were actual human beings with feelings. She tries to tell us her story with the numbers representing her situation, since as she is not able to tell it directly to us, with the situation she is in. Vernon who represents 22.48 has his perfect partner Janny, who he has had a good eye on for a while, while Laura the 22.49 remains alone and unreconciled, even though the two numbers were nearly the same. Close but not close enough. Laura then urges to find out why 22.49 is unreconciled as she wants to find out why she doesn’t belong with Vernon:“Six pipe caps, ex VAT and delivery: 22.49! Not lost, only mislaid! “There it is!” I screech.” (Page 4 line 147-148)Laura can now screech with relief knowing that she is not only mislaid with Vernon, but also that “the one” is out there waiting for her. A perfect man for her is out there, who is not Vernon but another man. She is now a happy woman and has dealt with her post-marriage conflict. To summarize, “Reconciliation” is a story where the narrator has a marriage conflict that she confronts and solves in a very unique way, regarding the reconciliation of the numbers. She goes through different phases during these conflicts, where she starts as a woman who desperately wants her husband back. She then develops her personality and ends with being a woman with her dignity in remain and is finally over her husband. The story has a good insight and aspect on how a person goes through a divorce/break-up and how you can react on different things you might have to solve in your everyday life in the future.